Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932 and is the author of numerous collections of poetry in both English and Spanish. She is the recipient of many awards, including the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award. She is one of the masterful practitioners of traditional form in contemporary American poetry, as this sonnet demonstrates. “Reservation” is from Where Horizons Go, published by New Odyssey Press, and is reprinted with permission.